20 guiding habits to finding work you love

Finding work you love is everyone’s ideal. Sadly, less than a third of Americans report doing work they love. I am fortunate to work with clients every day that are on a journey to a new future for themselves and their work. In fact, they are talking about a future that they find authentic and meaningful; not without challenges, but inspired and impactful. They are each growing in their careers or starting new businesses. They are changing careers or leading new companies. But there some similarities between their paths that they are learning, or have learned to live by in this journey. I call them the guiding habits for creating or manifesting work you love.

20 guiding habits

Think big.Have a big vision of what you intend to accomplish from the get-go. Get out of your head trash and go to the place that causes your hands to shake because it would be exciting and scary. Stop listening to the people who say you can’t.

Don’t play small. When your vision isn’t big enough, you only accomplish the middle of the dream. Sometimes your idea of “realistic” is really code for not knowing how to get there, or a mindset that it’s not possible. Sure, you can stay there for a little while, but go back to #1 – inspire yourself.

Fail big. Fail often. Fear of failure is a waste of time. I get it, failure stings. Actually, it’s not a failure when you learn from it. Better to do it soon though, before giving away your time, which isn’t a renewable resource. Remember your strengths.Most of all, take time to assess – but don’t stay there.

Value your time more than money. So don’t waste your time on the 80% (Pareto’s 80/20 principle), or on networking without connecting the dots.

Invest in yourself. Get a coach and a mentor. Sign up webinars and classes. Read every day. Because there’s not enough time to learn it all on your own.

Creativity is key to your success. Actually, it’s a mindset change. It requires putting yourself into a state of absorption, and fearlessness. Be a maverick. Get out of your ruts. Learn to rest and recharge.

Focus on your strengths. You can spend a lot of time focused on trying to improve your weaknesses. If they are relational, work on them. Otherwise, outsource your weaknesses and the things you hate doing. Stop thinking no one can do it as well as you – delegate!

Do uncomfortable things. If it’s comfortable, you know you’re not pushing enough. Sometimes setting goals is the first place to push yourself. A little discomfort leads to productivity.

Speak up. If you don’t tell the world what you are doing or thinking, they won’t know about it. Contribute your observations or successes to your team, to your customers, and to your community.

Get others to help you. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. This goes hand in hand with #11.

Be vulnerable. Let people in. Since the state of being vulnerable can be an act of courage, this kind of risk-taking isn’t passive but instead, is actively being willing to put it out there in reaching for the greatest rewards as you define it.

Promote yourself. Just do it a genuine way. Bring your whole self. Don’t wait to be seen. Write, comment, vlog.

Your competitors are yourrole models. Study and learn from them. It’s where you will recognize not only how you’re different, but how they interact internally, externally, and ethically and how you interact.

See yourself as a contributor in your field. Don’t exclude yourself because you are new or inexperienced. When you’re new, you see things with fresh eyes and fresh ideas.

Take care of yourself. This is a long journey. You need healthy mind, body, and heart. Make your own self-care plan and stick to it. It’s not a badge of honor to be exhausted.

Find a powerful support group.A mastermind. A small group of like-minded colleagues. Find people who will help you grow, make connections, truly see you, and keep you accountable.

Find inspiration and guidance in those who have mastered what you are trying to accomplish. Reach out to them. Follow them on social media. Doing work you love is a journey of discovery.

Share your expertise freely. Give more than you take. Don’t hoard information. Let people learn from you. The more you give, the more you receive – in relationships and inspiration.

Pursue your passion for its fire, inventiveness and life force. Your inspiration is what gives you the fuel you need even in the dark days. Don’t let anyone dampen it.

Nurture patience. Finding/doing work that you love is a process. No one is an overnight success. There will be down days. (see #3, #8)

Mindset and heart space

Remember that your mindset and attitudes underpin the whole journey to doing work you love. Creation and manifestation are acts of courage. In making a transition, it’s not just understanding the past, but what you can change about it to move on. For many people, uncertainty can overwhelm: it can be difficult to see which path to take, in the midst of change or transition. So, stop going it alone. Ask for help. And bring your hesitancy, your disappointed, overwhelmed, or confused self on a new journey toward the life you deserve. When you allow yourself to deeply listen to yourself, you will gain clarity and passion for doing work you love.

We need a fresh start and conscious awakening. If you’re like me, your lives are flooded with information from every direction. And we have become very good at selecting the information we choose to let in, to affect us, to learn from, to judge others and ourselves by, and to believe. We filter that information by choice on how it fits our beliefs, our experiences, our worldview, and our desires. Inevitably, we reject the information that doesn’t seem to directly fit. Thus, if we find ourselves reacting to the content of information and it makes us feel uncomfortable, or afraid, or helpless, we reject it, or get angry, or pretend we didn’t see it.

Dead or alive?

As we are all connected on a deeper human level, we can’t pretend we didn’t consume it. Unfortunately, that information remains inside of us and shows up as an unconscious worry, doubt, anxiety and depression. Or, we experience feelings that bubble up related to that information, but don’t know why. Most of all, we just want to stop feeling that way. We feel brittle, ghost-like. So, we try to ignore the feelings: we eat, drink, anaesthetize ourselves with medication, with shopping or trips, with mindless entertainment. Or it shows up as anger, lack of compassion, lack of focus. In ways that matter, we begin to deaden ourselves. It’s as if we willourselves into stressful, reactionary, unhappy and frantic lives. As Sigmund Freud said, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” And as we suffer, so do our families, our colleagues, and our communities. When that happens, we become less than our true selves. We no longer are living our highest potential.

It’s time for a fresh start – to awaken

When you go through a conscious awakening, you undergo a period of intense change and revelation in your life.

If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing. –Gail Sheehy

Conscious awakening doesn’t mean that you shut out the information, the news, the situations we face. So, it requires that we take a step back for a moment and find a breath of distance. A breath of distance is when we stop and breathe and focus fully on what we are seeing, hearing, reading. Perhaps, we listen fully to the person who is speaking. Since the breath allows us to find clarity, we can make a choice on how we want to respond. When we choose a breath of distance, we move past the urge to complain – complaining is a negative release of energy that disempowers us. Or it releases stress, anxiety, and anger.

Consciousness leads t0 intuitively and creatively taking action

Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, tells us: “Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Wherever there is integrated information, there is experience.” The more we move to being conscious, the more we understand ourselves and the world. A conscious awakening begins with a quiet moment as we go inside to question our beliefs and reactions. Here you find answers to your suffering and can make peace within moments of silence. Most importantly, this is where you will recognize your spirit, your purpose, and your ability to choose. What reflects your highest potential? As we begin to figure out whether we can change something and how, we can take conscious action. Or, sometimes we choose to surrender to the situation within ourselves. A fresh start might mean walking away in order to go within, or working with a coach on mindfulness.

All humans connect through consciousness. So, how we think, act, react, and believe ripples out from us into the world and affects others. Consequently, we have a responsibility to one another to respond to the world from a place of consciousness.

How does mindfulness benefit my business?

Mindfulness benefits business but only if you use it. If you’re a start-up company, a freelancer, a small business, or a nonprofit, you are stressed – about money. Stressed thinking does not lead to good decisions, more sales, or improved relationships. It damages our health. In our agitation, we often focus on small things we can control, rather than bold moves. We try to manage the details of what we are already doing rather than calmly analyzing what’s going well and what’s failing. We are unable to come up with creative solutions.

And what is failure anyway? Failure is part of critical growth. Did you see a child give up walking after falling down? Of course not. You see them learn to hold onto things, to take shorter walks, and to fall down but get up again. There are dozens of studies on how mindfulness practices can improve our stress levels, and our sleep. Stress can also have a huge impact on our creativity and decision-making.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill

Creative paralysis is fear of failure

We procrastinate in making hard decisions, and holding the hard conversations we dread. It’s as if avoiding things will make it get better. Mindfulness benefits include converting our fear of failure to action. One of the most frequent sources of creative paralysis is fear of failure. It’s nonaction that keeps us stuck doing the same thing over and over with no improvement rather than risk ‘failure.’

So, back to mindfulness and what benefits it brings to my business. Mindfulness does 4 important things for business leaders: it brings focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion (for yourself, and others) back into your field of awareness. I recently was working with a nonprofit executive. She was simply unable to see how her reluctance to create an earned revenue program was keeping her tied to fickle foundation funding. When we began to explore her beliefs around money using mindfulness, she began to let herself explore new opportunities. Mindfulness benefits for her were connecting again with skills in leadership that she could use in this new endeavor. And, happily she was able to gain foundation dollars to support the launch.

Mindfulness benefits: is it really as simple as breathing?

Breathing is where you begin to focus your attention. And the breathing that is part of mindfulness work is where you start to get some distance from the pressure of current issues. It’s where you start to tune into what your body is feeling, and the emotional surges that upset your day. Mindfulness is a practice which means you might try to do it every day, or even several times a day. You do it because the practice bears fruit within days of keeping at it. You can read more about the steps to mindfulness here.

When you go to the beach, you breathe in the salt air, you feel the warm sun on your lips, and the wind across your shoulders. You notice the ocean, the sky, the sand as you gaze at the ocean waves coming in and out. You often find you’re not thinking about much of anything. And, you can probably see mindfulness benefits easily in this scenario.

Now imagine having a moment like that in your day where instead of waves, you see those things you believe to be failures, or irritating people, or worrisome sales numbers also floating in and out with the breath. Can you be a witness and observer and look at it on all sides? In a place of detachment, can you step back and let it just be without assigning pejoratives, and see what isn’t working?

Shifting beliefs

Mindful benefits your ability to face what scares you. It is possible to see how your beliefs and thoughts can be transformed to ones of confidence, to courage, to a creative solution as we see how to shift our usual patterns by becoming more aware of them. And, your mind can become a bridge from the problem to the answer.

Mindfulness is key to success – busyness is not

Today I talked with a small group of women entrepreneurs about the importance of mindfulness in their day. One of the women described her day. It includes running from phone call to a meeting to picking up kids. Followed by making dinner, answering emails to creating a presentation. Her day consists of checking off tasks and activities as she went as she juggles a burgeoning business and a young family. She shared that emotionally she feels drained and overwhelmed. And yet, every day she thinks she was being successful: “I am accomplishing a great deal and something useful seems to be getting done, and I am getting lots of positive press for my business.”

Is this how you measure success?

We spent some time in practicing some mindfulness pauses. She revealed that she was equating a busy schedule and positive reviews with a happy life. She began to notice that she was never fully present in any moment or activity, already skipping ahead mentally to the next thing. “I’m simply going from meeting to activity on my daily schedule,” she said, “but I’m not really there.” I’m driving my kids while thinking about my last meeting, and looking at a paper for my next conversation. I never have enough time to focus on the next innovation needed in my business. Then it’s time to put the kids to bed, and stay up till midnight responding to emails and preparing my presentation that’s in two days. I fall into bed at night just to wake up the next morning and start all over. I’m exhausted.”

By recognizing how much time we spend in a mental state known as continuous partial attention, we deprive ourselves of fully living. We feel anxious about more complex situations as we don’t take the time to give it our full attention. We seem to expect ourselves to multitask, efficiently answering emails while on a conference call. Sound familiar?

Ghosting, the opposite of mindfulness

I call this ‘ghosting,’ where one’s form appears to be solidly present but the life force inside is vapory and permeable, hovering around the edges of your life. And when you’re in this state of being, you lose touch. You no longer know what motivated you in the first place. You don’t recognize the person you envisioned yourself to be as the lead in your own life. But now, there are others who depend on you.

So how can you choose differently?

This requires a change in your beliefs about success norms. As a culture, everyone tries to copy and reengineer what we observe as success with others we admire. But that is often a focus on the past which had its own circumstances, rules, norms, and relationships. Comparing our lives, choices, relationships, successes to another can be a learning experience. But it can also be a slippery slope to devaluing the uniqueness of your own market, relationships, expertise and intuition. In being focused, you allow your own creativity and relationships develop new choices that enrich your life and fit your goals.

So where does mindfulness fit in this?

When you bring your full attention into the present moment, you become alert. You hold an inner focus – a fuller consciousness of what responses you can choose to challenges that are being presented in this moment. Or, you may begin to hear the sounds around you, take note of the day and weather, or the aches in your body. As you pay attention to your breath, bringing your awareness more into your body, you release a bit of what has been so important just the moment before. In that moment, a more fully conscious recognition of what is real and what is “drama” becomes possible. You begin to register what your arguments for and against the situation are as your values and beliefs arise. It may include an arising of your instincts or intuition, your “knowing” of what should happen next. You are able to listen more fully to your business partner. Or you find yourself enjoying your child’s recitation about the field trip experience today. In that moment, you can respond fully rather than react or push away these moments as distractions not on your checklist.

Mindfulness is a moment by moment practice

Creating a better future is dependent on the seeds you plant in the present moment. Planting seeds requires a full and complete acceptance of the present moment, one without judgement. Being present in this way helps you to have clarity about where to focus. And being nonjudgmental allows you to have compassion for yourself, and be more fully you in any moment. No more ghost, but rather a full present human. So here you are. Can you pause in your hurried, complicated, and entangled life to be present in this moment? You can begin by stopping and focusing on your breath. Where do you feel it in your body? In your nostrils? Can you just focus there for this moment now?

Mindfulness is the key to an enriching life and successful leadership.

Freelancing is harder than it looks. Conversations with freelancers these days always seem to begin with reports on what they’ve doing. And then, how busy they are, which triggers statements of overwhelm and fatigue. Yet when I ask them how they are feeling, people start talking about anxiety and even depression.

Freelancing produces anxiety for most freelancers I know.

With the freelancers I coach, the conversation almost always begins with a description of their “circle of anxiety.” It usually revolves around the feeling of needing to do more, and catastrophizing about what will happen if they don’t get that next gig, or work 12 hour days. They compare themselves to hamsters on a wheel running faster and
forgetting to jump off to eat or sleep. And when they do, they’re snapping at their partners and kids, or interrupting date night to check emails. While your experience might not be quite this fevered, you may find that you’re unable to think creatively about solutions to improve your offerings.

Freelancing means you also have to manage your own business: marketing, web, bookings, and more. The challenge for freelancers is that your time = your money. Your work depends solely on you doing the work. Freelancers generally don’t have systems that work for them when they’re not working. Because your time equals your money, it can create a cap on much income you can create.

Freelancers need to make space in their calendar for thinking like an entrepreneur.

Being a freelancer can be risky. If you took yourself out of the business, would it still work? What happens when you’re sick?

Freelancers tend to think of their services very narrowly. And that thinking tends to narrow the type of work they take on. Entrepreneurial thinking means seeing opportunities to meet a customer need with a new service or product. One idea can change everything.

Many freelancers start with a side project of some sort as a source of extra income. Sometimes those side projects take on a life of their own. Set a goal to increase your virtual offerings or courses, hire other freelancers to deliver some of the work, become a multiple business owner, or develop unique product and service offerings. These can lead you toward being a freelancing business that can sustain you in lean times.

8 Steps to thinking like an entrepreneur

So, how can you manage your day to make time for building new creative endeavors that generate income?

Time blocks on your calendar weekly are a great tool. Get off the hamster wheel!

Get some mindfulness practice going in the first 10 minutes of the timeblock to release the anxiety thoughts and refocus on the brain into the moment. It’s important to think deeply about things and train the brain to work at a deeper level.

Make your own learning a priority. Learning new things generates new thoughts and skills.

Find people, other thinkers to introduce yourself too to create new sparks.

Make a list of possible solutions to client problems.

Think about what you are passionate about and jot some notes for exploration.

Stuck for ideas? Analyze other sucessful freelancing companies and try to figure out why what they did worked – not the usual stuff, but what was unusual about it?

Work with a coach who can help you remove limiting blocks that keep you from making the most of challenges and opportunities.

Finally, when you’re feeling anxious and overwhelmed, ask yourself whether it is related to a breakdown or a breakthrough? Start with bringing a reality check to your anxiety. Are you rationalizing feelings of fear rather than facing them, figuring out what is real and what you can let go? Focusing on the 20% of what you can really move along rather than the 80% other stuff is a good place to begin. Start looking at your fears and see what’s real and what’s not. Releasing leads to what’s on the otherside – your next creative money-maker.

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